Alice Alldredge facts for kids

Alice Alldredge is an American oceanographer and marine biologist. She studies the ocean's tiny living things and how they affect the environment. Her work focuses on things like marine snow, how carbon moves through the ocean, and tiny ocean life such as microbes and plankton. Since 2003, she has been one of the most often quoted scientists in her field.

Early Life and Education

Alice Louise Alldredge was born in 1949 in Denver, Colorado, USA. She finished high school in Thornton, Colorado. In 1971, she earned a degree in biology from Carleton College. Her parents played a big role in inspiring her interest in science.

Ocean Science Career

Alldredge continued her studies and earned her PhD in 1975 from the University of California, Davis. After that, she spent a year studying at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. In 1976, she joined the team at the University of California, Santa Barbara. There, she has been doing important research on how ocean ecosystems work.

Research in the Ocean

Alice Alldredge has done research in many places. She works in her lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She also goes out into the open sea. She even works with the Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER) at the Mo'orea Coral Reef Long Term Ecological Research Site in Mo'orea, French Polynesia.

Discoveries in the Sea

Alldredge made some exciting discoveries. She found many tiny, clear gel-like particles in the ocean called Transparent Exopolymer Particles (TEP). She also found special zooplankton (tiny animals) that live near the seafloor. She studied how these creatures move around in places like coral reefs, seagrass meadows, and tidal sandflats.

She is a top expert on marine snow. This "snow" is made of tiny bits of dead plants, animals, and waste that fall to the bottom of the ocean. Her work helped us understand how these particles sink and how they carry carbon deep into the sea. She showed that marine snow sinks fast enough to deliver a lot of carbon to the deep ocean. This changed how scientists thought about how carbon cycles in the sea.

Ongoing Research and Impact

Besides teaching and research at UC-Santa Barbara, Alldredge continues her work at the Mo'orea Coral Reef. She studies how ocean currents move water around the island. Scientists there also look at how zooplankton and fish affect the reef. They also compare the water over the reef to water further offshore.

Alldredge's work has helped UC-Santa Barbara become a top university for science. It is ranked as the 7th best university in the world for its scientific impact and teamwork. She is also one of the most highly cited researchers in the world, meaning her work is often used by other scientists. She has been in the top 0.1% of cited researchers since 2003.

In 2004, Alldredge became the head of the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at UC-Santa Barbara.

Awards and Honors

Alice Alldredge has received many awards for her important work:

• In 1990, she was chosen as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
• In 1992, she won the Henry Bryant Bigelow Medal from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
• In 1995, she was given the first special teaching position for UC-Santa Barbara's Marine Science graduate program. She held this position until 2004.
• In 1996, she received a Distinguished Teaching Award for Sciences from UC-Santa Barbara.
• In 1998, she was selected as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.
• In 2008, she received the G. Evelyn Hutchinson Award from the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography.
• In 2011, she received the Alumni Association Distinguished Achievement Award from Carleton College, her old university.

See also

In Spanish: Alice Alldredge para niños